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As might have been expected, these caricatured and highly spiced sketches of what "transpired" in a London police court did make a strong humorous point of the language of the parties to the complaints, who were always of the lower, but not always of the lowest, classes. We have, for example, "werry impolitely," "a bootiful green-house," wulgar liberties," premonstratted [remonstrated] with him," "fistesess" [fists],1 upon instinc," "tould 'em," "intosticatedly," "fat ship" [sheep], "vauts the use o' vauking my legs off arter 'em," "got vell vhopped," "sich a sulky chap," "gemmen" [gentlemen], "werry whizzable [visible], "partiklar," as how," "blowed me up," "mollished her best cap to rags," "skrouged," "vorks at the vax," "a fresh chor of pigtail," "I com'd up," a bit arter," "ax sister," "this 'fernal old Jarman," "howsomever," "get me back my vife vot I vere lawfully married to last Monday vere a veek at Shoreditch church," "inwiggle her avay," "then, by goles, I'll go to Marlborough Street, for I vont be diddled out of my vife in this ere manner, howsomever." The general tone of these articles is exhibited in the following passage, which, coarse as it is, has more of their characteristic "humor" than appears in most of them :

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"Your Worship," said he, "I was sitting by the fire with my wife, talking tolerably quiet, and at last, about ten o'clock, Mary,' said I, 'I'll go to bed.' She made no reply, and I went to bed; and whatever possessed her I know no more than the child unborn, but I had n't been in bed many minutes before she rushed into the room, and pulled me, bed, bedstead, and all, slap into the middle of the floor! Lord bless you, sir!

1 This might be taken for a grotesque and untruthful exaggeration, but the orthoepist Walker remarks upon it as a peculiarity of low London speech in the early years of this century.

That the character of these articles as to language might be seen with sufficient completeness and particularity to warrant a general conclusion, I have given these examples, which, although comparatively few, exhibit that character fairly. Yet notwithstanding the volume in question contains no less than seventy-two of these reports (such an important indication were they of the "spirit of public journals" of London at that time; they are mingled, by the bye, with all the poetry of the Anti-Jacobin and John Bull, and with articles from the Times, the Morning Chronicle, and many interesting jeux d'esprit and political satires), in all the seventy-two only two instances of the misuse of h appear. One of these is, "My Lord Mops [the name, fictitious] said the high dear of such a thing was cursed low;" and the other, "Did n't I nurse you, and toddle you up, and pay three-years heddication for you at Mr. Tod's?" Now it is morally certain that in seventytwo articles of this character, in which so strong a point is made of language, if the misuse of h had then been regarded as it is now in England, or even if it had been even so distinctive as to have attracted attention, there would have been a copious exhibition of this marked and, according to the present standard of taste, this laugh-provoking solecism.

2

2 I should say that my copy of this book, which I picked up at a book-stall, is mutilated by the loss of a few pages.

Manifestly between the years 1820 and 1824 the maltreatment of h was not so remarkable, or rather so distinctive, a trait of pronunciation in England as it is at present. When we consider the great variety of the blunders in speech which are made the occasion of laughter in these articles, the inference is warranted that the sinking of the h was so common then as not to be regarded as a subject of public ridicule.

The earliest instance of the misuse of h that I have met with in a British publication has for its date the year 1820. It appeared in the Huntingdon Peerage, which was published in London in that year, and which gave a detailed account of the evidence and proceedings connected with the restoration of the earldom, which had been long in abeyance. The writer was Henry Nugent Bell, Esquire, Student of the Inner Temple. Mr. Bell, in his search for evidence, went down to a church near Leicester, where, notwithstanding the parish clerk's remonstrance, he resolved to examine two or three tombstones in the chancel. He thus recounts his interview with the clerk:

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"Amen gazed on me with a face of deprecation and amazement, and after a pause, to give distinctness to his response, asked, ‘Pray, sir, may I ax what countryman you be? I am sure you beant of our parish, or you would n't be in such a hurry to go to church this time o' the night.' And why not, my friend?' Why, no one in his senses would venture, that's all; though I believe there's nothing in the stories I've heard since I was a boy.' 'Stories! What stories do you mean?' 'Why, as how you see one Hastings, a warrior in Holiver Cromwell's time, canters about a marble horse of his over the gravestones at night. He was sequestrified by the Parliament in those times, which,

1 See also by this gentleman's style and title that neither were "three - barreled names" "Americanisms" seventy years ago.

The writer of the monograph from which this passage is quoted seems to have been not only an observant but a careful and methodical man, and to have made notes promptly of all his experiences; 2 and we may be pretty sure that he gives "Amen's" remonstrance and story with a reasonable degree of correctness. It is as remarkable for what it omits as it is for the one example of the H malady which it records. If the account of such an interview had been written by a gentleman of the Inner Temple nowadays, it need hardly be said that we should have had, "Pray, sir, may I hax w'at countryman you be? "you would n't be in such a 'urry; "that 's hall;"" the stories I'ave 'eard;" "one'Astings, a warrior in Holiver Cromwell's time, canters about a marble 'orse of 'is hover the gravestones; sequestrified," etc. And we may be sure - I, at least, am sure that this was the worthy parish clerk's way of speaking. The writer, however, was not impressed by the many and various slips upon h which I have indicated, because they were not strange to his ear, and therefore he did not record them. putting of an extra h upon so prominent a name as that of the great Protector did, however, impress him; and more, probably, because of the eminence of the name than for any other reason. This is the likelier because of the nature of the one solecism which he did remark, - a distinction which pertains also to the two instances found in the seventy-two humorous police reports in the

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The

2 The article in the Monthly Review is twentyfour pages long, and is rich in extracts.

Morning Herald. It will be perceived that in all of these three instances of an early observation and record of the H solecism the breathing is not dropped, but added: "high dear," "heddication," "Holiver." Now even at the present day this error is more remarkable than the other, and is indicative of a lower degree of breeding and association in the speaker than the other is. There are hundreds of thousands of people in England, who "drop their h's all over the floor," who never add a superfluous h, and who would be shocked at hearing it from one of their friends. This is the most aggravated form of the H malady, besides being the most violent distortion of normal pronunciation. When, therefore, we find this the first to be observed and recorded by humorists and writers of character sketches, we may reasonably infer that the lighter and easier error was passed over because it was so common and customable, so familiar to the ears of the writer himself, as not to be observed. All the more would this inference be warranted if there were evidence that about the time when these passages were written the dropping of the h was sufficiently common to elicit remark and protest from professed orthoepists. There is such evidence.

Walker was the first writer upon English orthoepy who treated his subject thoroughly, and with the nice discrimination of a careful and sensitive observer; and even to this day he remains at the head of English orthoepists. His successors have done little else than to work upon the material which he left them, and to record the comparatively few changes in polite speech which have taken place since his time. His pronouncing dictionary, with its copious and minute introduction, was published in 1791. The copy before me is the third edition, published after he had had the benefit of criticism, in 1807. In that, on page xvi., he remarks upon the "Fourth Fault" most to be

censured in the speech of Londoners as follows:

"A still worse habit than the last prevails, chiefly among the people of London: that of sinking the h at the beginning of words where it ought to be sounded, and of sounding it where it is not seen, or where it ought to be sunk. Thus we not unfrequently hear, especially among children, heart pronounced art and arm harm. This is a vice perfectly similar to that of pronouncing the v for the w and the w for the v, and requires a similar method to correct it."

The habit, therefore, did then exist, and not only among such people as Mr. Bell's parish clerk and the Morning Herald's police-court subjects: it “prevailed among people whom a writer like Walker had in mind in the preparation of his dictionary. Nor was it confined to Londoners, even in such a degree as to make it distinctive of their speech. It was rife in counties remote from the metropolis. I myself have observed it in men who told me that they had never been in London, and who must have derived it from their parents and their early associates, who probably, indeed quite surely, were as free as they were from urban contamination. And it is to be remarked and remembered that a habit of speech like this — any general habit of speech, in fact is always thus inherited. It does not appear suddenly, nor spring out of the ground. It passes insensibly from mouth to mouth, from generation to generation. This H malady was, however, and is, I believe, more prevalent in the south of England than in the north. The fact that it did "prevail" in England about the beginning of this century sufficiently to cause a writer like Walker (addressing himself to literate people, who were desirous of learning the most polite speech) to caution his readers against it, and the other fact that the dropping of the h is entirely passed over by contemporary humorous and character

sketch writers, while they do remark and record, although with extremest rarity, so late as 1820 to 1824, the grosser error of adding a superfluous h, make it clear, it would seem, that the former, the suppression of the breathing, was so common as not to attract the attention of literary persons on the lookout for ridiculous peculiarities of speech.

That it was so in the last quarter of the last century Miss Burney has left us evidence, both negative and positive, in her ever-charming Evelina, which was published in 1788. In that book there are vulgar people of various sorts; among them the proverbially vulgar Braughtons, who kept a hosier's shop in Holborn; and of characteristically vulgar speech we have enough, such as "most impudentest,” "tell him as we han't no coach here," "it i'n't the less provokinger," "you don't know nothing," "the ill-bredest person," " spare your self that there trouble," " you hant no eyes," "Mr. Smith as lodges on the first floor." Yet amid all this vulgar speech, and in a book in which the omission of 8 in isn't (i'n't) by the vulgar is continuously and carefully recorded, there is not one example of a dropped h, - not one. To this negative there is added positive evidence, the significance of which seems unmistakable. Every school-boy knows that the form of the indefinite article (whether an or a) is determined by the following word. If that begins with a consonant we drop the n; if with a vowel, n is retained. Before words beginning with the rough-breathed h we use a, as a horse, a hill, a home, a hotel; before words in which the initial h is silent we use an, as an hour, an heir, an herb. This is normal English speech. Now when we find a writer using an before a word beginning with h we may be sure that writer did not aspirate that

1 "An hair, an habergeon, an habitation, an hammer, an high hand (but a strong hand), an handbreadth, an hundred (this prevailed till very recently), an harlot, an haughty spirit, an head, an heap (but a great heap), an heart, an heavy

h. Miss Burney, in the person of her finely-bred and well-educated heroine, writes, "When at last we stopped at an hosier's in High Holborn, Sir Clement said nothing." (Letter xlvi.) This tells the tale Fanny Burney dropped her 's. To her a hosier was an osier. Not that she took a cockney stocking-vender for a willow twig, but she called him So. As she dropped h's herself, of course she did not observe that others did the same.

That the H malady prevailed, or at least existed, before Miss Burney's time I happen to have evidence at hand. It is in a copy of the first quarto edition of the authorized English Bible, published in 1612. In this book some of its former owners have recorded marriages and births, and among the records are the following:

"John Harmond Hand Mary was maried in the yeare of our Lord God 1735 nouember the 25 day.

"John the son of John Harmond was born the 24 day of June 1737 half a our after tow a clock."

"William Stubbs hand Ann Meakins was maried in the year of our Lord God 1787, February the 11."

We thus find in the middle half of the last century the pronunciation hand for and, and a our for an hour, among people who, however humble their condition (they were probably well-to-do farmers), could write and spell February correctly! Moreover, the text of the Bible itself is full of evidence of the general habit of suppressing the initial h, even among scholars. This evidence is in the constant use of an before words beginning with h, in which the rough breathing has been heard from good speakers in England for certainly half a century; whereas a is used before consonants. I give examples below.1 heart (but a proud heart), an hedge, an heifer, an helmet, an help, an herdman, an heritage (but a goodly heritage), an hill, an hin, an hired servant, an homer, an hoof, an hook, an horn, an horse (but a red horse), an host (but a great host), an